This time, they’d traveled by private jet, giving him a chance to get some sleep. Despite that, he still wasn’t fully recovered from the episode in the woods. His ankle had turned out to be much less of a problem than he’d anticipated but his use of Corporal Jeff Miller’s Merge had taken a lasting toll. Network records put his total connect time at a minute thirty-two. It was a record that would undoubtedly stand for a very long time.
He adjusted his sunglasses and pulled the brim of his hat down a bit, searching for people using Merges and finding only one tourist busy negotiating for a set of silver earrings. Dresner’s invention had gone from being a miracle to a threat with amazing speed — something that was more depressing than surprising. How many times had humankind made the mistake of thinking it could control complex technology? Anticipate how it would be used? How it could be subverted.
Was it possible that every Merge on the planet was searching for his face? Hell, had he already been tagged with a GPS coordinate?
Randi pulled ahead and turned down an empty side street with him close behind. Feral cats watched from a high wall as they skirted along it, finally stopping in front of a massive wood-and-copper door.
Star had tracked Eichmann down almost before their jet’s wheels left the ground. He led a private life, but didn’t seem to be making any special effort at anonymity. Who would be interested in an aging psychologist living out his golden years in sunny Morocco?
Randi, instead of immediately going to work on the lock like he was accustomed to, just stood there staring down at it. Smith glanced back at the narrow alley to confirm they were still alone.
“Problem?”
“What the hell am I supposed to do with this?”
“Your usual magic. Didn’t you once tell me there wasn’t a lock on the planet you couldn’t open?”
“This thing’s probably three hundred years old. What do I look like? Some kind of lock historian?
“So laser-cut keys, computer encryption, thumbprint activation — all a piece of cake to you. But this bucket of rust has stopped you dead.”
She shrugged. “Maybe we should just knock?”
Smith scowled and jerked a finger toward the mouth of the alley. Randi retraced their steps and peeked around the corner, giving him a thumbs-up, but with an urgency that suggested faster would be better than slower.
Smith grabbed a pipe running down the wall and began going up it hand-over-hand, keeping his eye on the rusty straps holding it to the stone. A few pulled out as he passed, but it held long enough to get him to the roof. He crept across it until he was at the inside edge, looking down onto three interconnected courtyards two stories below.
There was a passage below him protected only by a meter-high railing and he swung off the roof, landing on an elaborately tiled floor and nearly falling over the back of a sofa that made up one side of a conversation nook.
He pulled the pistol from his waistband and listened to something that sounded like pans banging downstairs. Beyond that, though, the massive riad-style house was silent. His initial urge was to go straight for the noise, but instead he decided to carry out a systematic search from the top down that would hopefully minimize surprises.
The floor he was on turned out to contain little more than three unused bedrooms. A winding stone staircase took him to the ground floor and he moved in the opposite direction of the noise through interior courtyards dominated by orange-tree-shaded fountains and a lap pool.
Hinges were all well oiled and he carefully opened every door, finding dens, bathrooms, storage areas, and two bedrooms that looked a bit more lived-in. The last door turned out to be the most interesting. Closed, it looked like all the others. When opened, though, it revealed not a room but another door — thick steel and with a high-tech lock that would be more to Randi’s liking.
He backtracked to the entry and eased the front entrance open. Randi immediately slipped inside and he signaled toward the kitchen. A Glock appeared from her chador and she took point, stopping in the archway at the end of the hall. Smith moved up behind her and saw a young woman arranging food on a silver tray. Lunch. But for whom?
The Glock disappeared again, replaced by a roll of duct tape. It was another reason she loved that particular disguise — the hardware and weapons store she could carry with no one the wiser.
He hung back as she slipped up behind the girl and clamped a hand over her mouth. Randi spoke soothing Arabic as she eased the terrified girl to the floor and began going to work with the tape.
He’d have helped, but since Muslim women were particularly resistant to being pawed by strange men, he padded over to the tray and began grazing on olives and hummus. It took only a few seconds for the girl to be completely silenced and immobilized — barely enough time for him to drizzle a little honey into a bowl of yogurt.
Randi whispered a few more reassuring words into the girl’s ear before standing and turning toward him. “Am I disturbing your lunch?”
“You should try this. She must make it herself.”
Randi let out an impatient breath and headed back toward the archway. He followed, but took the bowl and spoon with him.
“Check out the door to your left,” he said when he caught up.
She opened it and, spotting the second door inside, dropped to her knees to insert a key-shaped card with what looked like circuits imprinted on it. Less than thirty seconds after connecting it to her iPhone, the mechanical bolt slid obediently back.
“Good thing it wasn’t secured by a rope with a knot in it,” he commented. “We’d have been here all day.”
She scowled as they entered a small room packed with books, papers, and computer equipment. Randi took the chair in front of the terminal and stuck a thumb drive in the USB port while he browsed the hundreds of German and English titles on psychology and neurology.
“Damn!” Randi muttered.
“Problems again?”
“His encryption isn’t anything I’ve run into before.”
Smith came to a table stacked with loose papers and began scanning the statistical analyses, graphs, and endless columns of data. He finally dug up a partially completed abstract written in German and used it as a key to figure out the abbreviations on a poster-sized collection of charts.
“I don’t think I’m going to get anywhere, Jon. If we want into this thing, we’re going to have to pile it on a donkey and take it with us.”
“Uh-huh,” he said absently, continuing to dig through the papers on the table.
“Do you have something?”
“I’m not really sure. This looks like a long-term study of behavior and intelligence. The subjects were all adopted at birth…”
“And this is interesting to me how?”
He didn’t respond, continuing to try to decipher what he was reading but finding it increasingly hard to believe. Where would Eichmann have gotten this kind of data? While it was vaguely possible that he would be able to track thousands of cross-cultural adoptions, it seemed like every aspect of the children’s lives — from education to nutrition to parenting — had been meticulously controlled. Admittedly, the study design was impeccable, but it was also wildly unethical and completely illegal. And then there was the astronomical cost of micromanaging and recording every aspect of people’s lives over the better part of a quarter century.
“Jon? Are you—”
Randi went silent when the sound of a key being inserted in the massive lock on the front entrance floated in to them.
She made it into the courtyard first and he ran after her, skidding into the entryway just as the heavy door was swinging open. He pressed himself against the wall and watched a frail-looking man cross the threshold.